Over the past year the spotlight has come to fall on China's aggressive economic foray into Africa, where it secures energy stakes while doling out cheap credit. More cautiously, however, China also has been building new bridges to the Middle East, carving a place in a strategic region that is home to two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves.
The advance into the Middle East creates another front in Beijing's growing global rivalry with Washington and other western countries. "China's strategy in the Middle East puts us in a competition for influence," says Flynt Leverett, director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative at the New America Foundation in Washington. "But the answer is not a confrontational approach over energy interests it is to develop a more co-operative relationship with the Chinese on energy security..."

In its 2006 International Energy Outlook report, the US Department of Energy warned that the rising dependence of China on Middle Eastern oil supplies had geopolitical implications both for relations between the two regions and for the oil-consuming world as a whole...

"To a certain extent China's sub-Saharan Africa strategy is designed to reduce dependence on Middle East oil but even the most optimistic assessment of diversification is that it will continue to get at least half its oil from the Middle East," says Mr Leverett. "So China is interested in more strategic relations with Gulf oil producers, to carve a privileged place for itself and become a high-priority customer."

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